Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  In an interview some years later, the half-nephew claimed that Hitler yelled at him, “These people must not know who I am. Nobody must know where I come from.”

  But according to Hans Frank’s account, some elements of which are corroborated by the nephew’s interview, this was not the end of the relationship between the black-sheep British relative and the German führer.

  According to Frank, the nephew, perhaps sensing there was financial advantage to be gained from the Führer’s sensitivity to questions of family history, sent what Hitler described as a blackmail letter to him: “One day, it must have been towards the end of 1930,” Frank wrote in his memoir, “I was called to the residence of Hitler at Prinzregentenplatz. He told me, with a letter lying before him, [of] a ‘disgusting blackmail plot’ in connection with one of his most loathsome relatives, with respect to his own ancestry.”

  Hans Frank tells us the source of this blackmail was

  a son of Hitler’s half-brother Alois who was gently hinting that in view of certain allegations in the press it might be better if certain family matters weren’t shouted from the roof tops. The press reports in question suggested that Hitler had Jewish blood in his veins and hence was hardly qualified to be an anti-semite. But they were phrased in such general terms that nothing could be done about it. In the heat of the political struggle the whole thing died down. All the same, this threat of blackmail by a relative was a somewhat tricky business. At Hitler’s request I made some confidential inquiries.

  Confidential inquiries: The language is that of the confidential operative, the private eye. The language and the role are uncharacteristic for the usually self-aggrandizing Frank, who saw himself as an Aryan jurisprudential visionary, not a common peeper.

  Frank does not describe the details of his confidential inquiries or how he was led to the potentially explosive cache of documents, the purported smoking gun in the Hitler-ancestry controversy. He says only that he found them “in the possession of a woman living in Wetzlsdorf near Graz [Austria] who was related to Hitler through the Raubals”—Geli Raubal’s family.

  All Frank says about the process is that

  intensive investigation elicited the following information: Hitler’s father was the illegitimate son of a woman by the name of Schicklgruber from Leonding near Linz who worked as a cook in a Graz household. . . . But the most extraordinary part of the story is this: when the cook Schicklgruber (Adolf Hitler’s grandmother) gave birth to her child, she was in service with a Jewish family called Frankenberger. And on behalf of his son, then about nineteen years old, Frankenberger paid a maintenance allowance to Schicklgruber from the time of the child’s birth until his fourteenth year. For a number of years, too, the Frankenbergers and Hitler’s grandmother wrote to each other, the general tenor of the correspondence betraying on both sides the tacit acknowledgment that Schicklgruber’s illegitimate child had been engendered under circumstances which made the Frankenbergers responsible for its maintenance. . . . Hence the possibility cannot be dismissed that Hitler’s father was half Jewish as a result of the extramarital relationship between the Schicklgruber woman and the Jew from Graz. This would mean that Hitler was one-quarter Jewish.

  There are some obvious problems with this story, or at the very least with Frank’s recollection of it seventeen years later at Nuremberg. Maria Schicklgruber came not from “Leonding near Linz” (where Hitler later went to school) but from Strones, near Döllersheim. Nor is there any independent evidence that Maria Schicklgruber worked for a Jewish family in Graz. Researchers have found no traces of a Frankenberger family living in Graz, although Werner Maser did locate evidence that a forty-two-year-old butcher and tripe boiler named Frankenreither was residing there in 1836, the year of Maria’s mysterious conception.

  Was Hans Frank serving up tripe himself? Maser, who disbelieves the story, suggests that Frank’s conversion to Catholicism led him to invent a Jewish ancestor for the nominally Catholic Hitler “to foment unrest, anxiety and a lasting sense of guilt” among Jews, as if somehow the possibility of one Jew’s murky liaison in 1836 with Hitler’s grandmother should somehow make all Jews feel responsible for Hitler’s crimes. Others have suggested that Frank was projecting his own family romance—his apparent belief he might have been descended from a Jewish grandfather named Frankfurter—onto Hitler.

  Nonetheless, those who have challenged the factual basis of Frank’s account of his confidential inquiries and his claim to have discovered paternity correspondence to corroborate it have for the most part ignored or failed to refute the even-more-surprising coda to his story: Frank’s description of Hitler’s reaction to Frank’s report on his confidential inquiries, his recollection of Hitler’s attempt to refute its potentially devastating implications. A reply in which Hitler, according to Frank, conceded the essential truth of the Frankenberger story, did not dispute the authenticity of the paternity correspondence with the Jewish family, but added an ugly twist to it, one that blackened his own grandmother Maria Schicklgruber’s character, in an effort to absolve himself of the imputation of Jewish blood, which the bare facts of Hans Frank’s “intensive investigation” seemed to establish.

  “Adolf Hitler,” Frank recalled in his memoir,

  said he knew . . . that his father [was not the child of] the Schicklgruber woman and the Jew from Graz. He knew it from what his father and his grandmother told him. He knew that his father sprang from a premarital relation between his grandmother and the man whom she later married [Georg Hiedler]. But they were both poor, and the maintenance money that the Jew paid over a number of years was an extremely desirable supplement to the poverty-stricken household. He was well able to pay, and for that reason it had been stated that he was the father. The Jew paid without going to court probably because he could not face the publicity that a legal settlement might have entailed.

  Setting aside for the moment the question of the origin of the story—Hitler’s actual words or Hans Frank’s imagination—consider it as a story of origins. At the very least it’s Hans Frank’s “just so” story, his explanation of how Adolf Hitler became an anti-Semite. And what a sordid, degrading story of origins it is. Beneath Frank’s compressed, clinical recitation is a seamy tale of sexual blackmail in which Hitler’s grandmother engages in a sordid shakedown scheme, one that left a legacy of sexual and racial ambiguity Hitler could not extricate himself from, one that doesn’t even fully exempt him from the imputation of Jewish blood.

  The Hitler family film noir, as Hans Frank recalls Hitler telling it, begins with sexual tension and ends with sexual ambiguity. She is forty-two and he is nineteen; she is a servant, he the son of the master. Something transpires between them, perhaps something calculated in advance on her part. Perhaps as little as a look, perhaps much more. She gets pregnant, she tells her shiftless local-yokel wandering-miller boyfriend that the child is his, not the Jewish boy’s, which might or might not be true; only she knows. Or does she? The two of them, Maria and the miller, can barely support themselves much less a child, so they cook up a scheme to extort funds from the wealthy Jew by accusing his son of getting her pregnant. Whether she actually seduced the son in order to use him as a pawn in her scheme or cold-bloodedly lied about the actual sexual contact is irrelevant. Because at some point there comes the showdown, the sit-down, the squeeze is put on. The extortion threat is made explicit. The specter of pogrom is invoked as the ultimate threat: If the Jew doesn’t begin making payoffs, the conniving couple will make sure there’s a public outcry about the lustful Jewish sexual predator staining the honor of a helpless Aryan maiden. The result, as Frank laconically puts it: “The Jew paid.”

  Recall that this sordid intrigue is, according to Frank, the way Hitler wanted him to view his grandparents. Better to see them as petty-crook grifters, a whore-and-pimp extortion team, than envision the possibility that his father was fathered by a Jew, although Hitler’s “alibi” in Frank’s account does not rule out the possibility that there was a sexual
relationship between Maria and the boy.

  It’s astonishing how much mischief this one story has caused since it came to light in 1953 when Hans Frank’s family published an edition of his memoir in Germany, astonishing how many years of research, years of debate have been devoted to disentangling the ambiguities embedded in it. Taking the story on its own terms as told by Frank—before attacking the problem of its credibility—there are two crucial questions left unresolved: Did Maria Schicklgruber actually sleep with the nineteen-year-old boy, or was a threat of the public accusation of violation enough to extort the money from the Jewish family for all those years? And if she did sleep with the Jewish boy about the time she conceived a child by her partner (and later husband) Johann Georg Hiedler, could she be certain the child was Hiedler’s and not Frankenberger’s? The early-nineteenth-century peasant’s lack of sophistication about reproductive timing argues that, even for Maria Schicklgruber herself, pater incertus est.

  Some of the most sophisticated late-twentieth-century Hitler explainers have tried to make a virtue out of the necessity of uncertainty here: They’ve taken the uncertainty at the heart of the seedy intrigue over Maria’s pregnancy and made it the essence of their explanation of the otherwise inexplicable virulence of Hitler’s anti-Semitism. They postulate a kind of chain of uncertainty, a communicable uncertainty that leads from Maria Schicklgruber’s inability to be sure which of the two men, Aryan or Jew, got her pregnant, to the galling uncertainty in Adolf Hitler’s mind over whether or not he was “infected by Jewish blood.”

  Crucial to understanding the link between Maria’s uncertainty and her grandson Adolf’s uncertainty, in this view, is the dynamic of Hitler’s crackpot physio-mystico sexology. His favorite anti-Semitic theorist, Julius Streicher, ran admonitory stories in Der Stürmer about Aryan women who’d had intercourse with Jewish men discovering to their horror that, after repeated exposure, “Jewish seed” had insinuated itself into their blood, and that as a consequence they were turning Jewish.

  Robert Waite, the Williams College historian who is the most energetic advocate of the Hans Frank story as an explanation for Hitler’s anti-Semitism, cites a passage in Mein Kampf in which Hitler speaks of the peculiar potency of even the fractional presence of Jewish blood, the way it can infiltrate and subvert the Aryan component, a passage in which Waite believes Hitler is speaking of a struggle going on within himself. Hitler describes the struggle within the “racially divided being,” between the Aryan and Jewish components, and the infallible signal by which the power of the Jewish blood can be detected: “The first products of such cross-breeding, say in the third, fourth, and fifth generation [he, of course, was third generation] suffer bitterly. In all critical moments in which the racially unified being makes the correct, that is, unified decisions, the racially divided one will become uncertain; that is, he will arrive at half measures.”

  The legacy of uncertainty over Maria Schicklgruber’s sexual choices would, in Waite’s view, consign Hitler to a state of hypervigilance: always searching his consciousness for the telltale signal, the slightest indication of hesitation, of uncertainty, of the infirmity of will that would indicate his Aryan blood was adulterated with sinister Semitic serum. And thus—and herein lies the heart of Waite’s Hitler explanation—always seeking to prove his purity, his freedom from infirmity, by the unrelenting, uncompromising ferocity of his war against the Jews, exterminating the doubts about the Jew within himself by murdering all the Jews within his reach.

  The problem with building such a dauntingly elaborate superstructure of explanation upon the uncertainty within the Hans Frank story is that such attempts ignore the uncertainty about the Hans Frank story. Waite and others have attempted to evade this question by stressing that they are concerned not so much with the actuality of Hitler’s genealogy—whether he really had a Jewish grandfather—as with whether he believed he might have and thus generated the obsessively anti-Jewish hypervigilance that belief entailed. But this assumes that Hitler had actually heard a version of this story that led to an early, festering, lifelong obsession.

  While in fact, there’s no evidence that Hitler even heard this rumor, aside from Frank’s story; and we only have Frank’s word that he presented Hitler with “proof” of it. And the evidence for a lifelong obsession with his own ancestry is thinly corroborated, if at all, conjectural at best, almost wishful thinking. There is some external corroboration of the Hans Frank story but only for the very beginning of it; the letter to Hitler from “the loathsome relative,” the one Hitler characterized as “a disgusting blackmail plot.” As we’ll see in more detail shortly, the OSS debriefing of Hitler’s black-sheep English nephew William Patrick Hitler seems to confirm that he did send Hitler a letter that disturbed the Führer, and to confirm that the cause of the disturbance was Hitler’s sensitivity on the subject of family history. But the OSS debriefing makes no mention of a specifically Jewish problem in the family history.

  The search for further corroboration of the Hans Frank story has led to wild-goose chases, red herrings, and every other cliché of futility. The correspondence, supposedly reflecting paternity payments from the Frankenbergers to the Schicklgruber/Hiedler ménage, has never turned up. Archival searches in Graz have found no traces of the spectral Frankenberger family.

  On the other hand, unfortunately, it has turned out to be difficult to prove the absolute impossibility of the story. No sooner had an archivist named Nikolaus Predarovich claimed to have established that Jews had been barred from living in the province of Styria (which encompasses Graz) through the middle of the nineteenth century than Werner Maser, who doubts the Hans Frank story in general, nonetheless proved that Jewish traveling salesmen were permitted entry to the September fair at the Feast of Saint Giles held annually at Graz in the 1830s, which would have permitted an encounter between Maria and a traveling salesman in September 1836, the month in which Hitler’s father was conceived.

  Those who have attempted to prove on the basis of his character that Hans Frank fabricated this story have not had a much better time of it. If one watches Hans Frank’s fiery, fist-shaking, rabble-rousing performance at the Nuremberg Party Day rally in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, one sees someone who looks like a brutal thug, capable of great cruelty and viciousness, but not—at least on the surface—the type capable of the diabolic subtlety, the history-destabilizing mischief that crafting such a story out of whole cloth, insinuating a counterfeit Hitler explanation so successfully into the historical stream of consciousness, would require.

  On the other hand, a different version of Frank emerges in the brilliantly vicious, utterly unforgiving portrait of him by his son, Niklas Frank, who (in a memoir called In the Shadow of the Reich) depicts his father as a craven coward and weakling, but one not without a kind of animal cunning, an instinct for lying, insinuation, self-aggrandizement. For this Hans Frank, disgraced and facing death on the gallows for following Hitler, fabricating such a story might be a cunning way of ensuring his place in history as the one man who gave the world the hidden key to the mystery of Hitler’s psyche. While at the same time revenging himself on his former master for having led him to this end by foisting a sordid and humiliating explanation of Hitler on him for all posterity. In any case, it was one Frank knew the victors would find seductive.

  And it has continued to be seductive. It remains, years later, one of the two great temptations of Hitler explanation lore (the other being the Geli Raubal perversion story), tempting because it offers the gratification of a totalizing, single-pointed explanation of Hitler’s psychology.

  Not surprisingly, psychologists in particular have been drawn to it. Perhaps the first to be seduced—and the most important witness for Frank’s credibility—was the American psychologist and confidant who guided Frank through the process of producing his memoir, Dr. G. M. Gilbert. Gilbert, an army captain with a Ph.D. in psychology, was the man whose job it was to observe the working of Frank’s mind, to get benea
th his defenses. He came away convinced that Frank did not manufacture this story.

  I’ll never forget listening to the tape of the interview Gilbert gave to John Toland. I’d found the tape in the research material Toland had donated to the archives of the FDR Library in Hyde Park, New York. On the tape, you can hear the urgency in Toland’s voice as he questions Gilbert about Hans Frank’s story. Toland seems to want to believe Hans Frank was telling the truth about his investigation into Maria Schicklgruber’s love life. He wants to believe there’s an explanation for Hitler he can credit. But he’s aware how much depends on questions of belief.

  “You believe this investigation [into Hitler’s ancestry] did take place?” Toland implores Gilbert. “You’re the only one in the world who can tell us.” It’s a dramatic moment: Toland is saying he believes Gilbert holds the key to the last best hope of explaining Hitler.